Paragraph A Week (PaW)

Paragraph a Week (PaW) was conceived during the school year 1998-99 by a group of 5/6th grade connected educators from all around the world. This was back in the early days of the World Wide Web when blogs did not exist. There was no Teachers Pay Teachers, only a few teacher websites, and chat rooms were still in their infancy.

I did have one of those rare Teacher Websites. Called The Teacher's Desk I posted all my fun lesson ideas to share with other web teachers. I received many email messages thanking me for sharing my  material. From these messages came our group of connected educators. Imagine all the individual email addresses we all had to organize. Phew! It got crazy.

In early 1998 we discovered LISTSERV groups. This streamlined our emailing and allowed the group to grow to over 500 teachers. We readily shared and created lessons. Paragraph a Week was one of our projects. I was one of the coordinators for PaW, a prolific topic writer, and storage supervisor (the PaW program was housed at my website).

When I closed my website in 2012 in favor of a free blog, Paragraph a Week was no longer accessible to teachers except through the web archive The Way Back Machine. Here you can find all of the original PaW topics. I received MANY email messages asking where the PaW topics had gone; some were even threats. I imagine those were from panicked teachers looking for a topic a few minutes before their class was scheduled to commence.

In 2013 I opened my blog The Teacher's Desk 6 and decided to reissue the PaW topics and program materials. At first I posted a topic sporadically, usually near a holiday. Now each Tuesday a topic is shared as part of the series The Tuesday Writing PaWs. Below is a current list of all the newly reissued topics. They are in no particular order; some yield a single paragraph composition while others a multi-paragraph text. Regardless, they are yours for the using!

1. Leprechauns
2. Earth Day
3. Mother's Day
4. Finish the Phrase
5. Nice
6. National Pencil Month
7. Favorite Valentine Memory
8. Bird's Eye View of Spring
9. Abe and George
10. Journey of a Snowflake
11. Color
12. A Tribute to Johnny Appleseed
13. School Uniforms
14. Chocolate Rain
15. Good Substitute Teacher
16. Favorite Relative
17. Allowance
18. Best Teacher
19. Signs of Fall
20. Making Sense of an Apple
21. Do You or Don't You Halloween?
22. Favorite Halloween Activity
23. Pumpkin Contest Part 1
24. Pumpkin Contest Part 2
25. Making a Discovery
26. Thanksgiving Guest
27. Holiday Smells
28. Advent Traditions
29. Christmas Presents
30. Planet
31. Snow Day
32. Catholic Schools Week
33. Thank Goodness
34. Reading
35. Water
36. Favorite Outfit
37. Memorial Day
38. Don't Bug Me